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Paul Oughton, publishing executive for Bethesda, spoke to GamesIndustry about the company's plans for the future, and his comments include some information about the next Elder Scrolls game. Quoting:
"'At the moment we've got Fallout 3 for this year and potentially there's a new Elder Scrolls title in 2010,' said Oughton. 'At the moment we're not that interested in the Wii. We're going to stick to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. We'll continue to pursue three or four titles a year and go for big titles,' he said of the company's publishing plans for the future."

Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't. Although the fighting was improved, it didn't feel very interactive (nor expansive). The way that could be improved is to integrate the classes a bit more. They gave you the feature to fight as a mage/fighter/rouge, but the system didn't demand nor support integration very much. Alchemy was the only skill that was really useful throughout all the classes, but a warrior never really had a great need to cast a fireball when his fighting was so much more effective. A wizard never really needed to sneak when invisibility was much more convenient. They should have made monsters that are more immune to certain tactics. For instance, a mage comes upon a vampire that has extraordinary hearing. Rather than casting a spell, you'll have to depend on your sneaking abilities to approach him. You cast a freezing spell that is useless on him and must throw a (potions should have been throwable) exploding potion to knock him back since fire is also useless, then you pull out your sword with copious amounts of poison on it to subdue him (your skill with a sword does not matter since the poison is so effective). Also, the physics engine could have more juice squeezed out of it. There should have been gravity gun telekinesis and the ability to pick things up and throw them. Imagine being ambushed by some nut in a bar and throwing a chair at him to knock him back for a stronger attack. Man that would have improved the game a lot.

I assume you played Morrowind? If you wanted to beat the game, you were a heavily-armored, melee battlemage with thief skills; pure anything was tough to do. They went way out of their way with Oblivion to make a much broader range of archetypes not only possible (as they certainly were in Morrowind) but playable in the main campaign.

I beat it fairly easily with a pure Melee character and a pure rogue (that was sickeningly hard compared to the other) I found the caster to be the most variable of the lot - I had big issues sometimes and others it was extremely easy.

Actually, when I played Morrowind I completely beet the game with alchemy and enchanting. The enchanting skill was so useful because if you killed a skeleton and put it into a cheap soul gem, you could make 10 damage fireballs rain like crazy, and the potions essentially kept you immortal. By the time I had high level enchanting, I could kill just about anything. All you had to do was keep a massive supply of rings on you. It was way too easy.

a warrior never really had a great need to cast a fireball when his fighting was so much more effective. A wizard never really needed to sneak when invisibility was much more convenient.

There are lots of combat options!
When you're running along and something like a wolf gets in the way, why waste time drawing your sword and meleeing the creature when you could just kill it with a single zap of a health-drain spell and keep on going? My level 11 character uses several combat tactics depending on enemy:

Your example makes it sound like you think that every character should *have* to be all three to viable. That's just absurd. The game was designed as it should be - all of the above are viable options and you don't have to go all routes to be able to subdue the big bad enemy. A pure melee class *should* be viable in the game, as should a pure mage or rogue.

Even though I'm a big fan of the Elder Scrolls series, the voice actors weren't the only bone I had to pick. The team had a large dynamic engine that they could have taken more advantage of and didn't.

[...stuff about combat...]

Man that would have improved the game a lot.

You couldn't be more wrong. I actually have a hard time believing that you would have enjoyed the game more if they did those things, and they're your ideas.

I would have it be about a son that Barenziah had who nobody knew about, which has been theorized before based on her past storyline. He should come back trying to claim the throne now that the Emperor is dead. Barenziah was always my favorite character from the lore, and it would be cool to have various factions trying to take over now that the Empire's in shambles, with Barenziah's son being the primary one. Given the history of the Empire and its leader, he would have a right to be pissed.

...Though I was impressed (read: quite nearly drooling) over Patrick Stewart as Emperor Uriel Septim VII. *That* was a well voiced intro. Sean Bean (Boromir in LotR) did an excellent Martin Septim, and Terence Stamp (various bad guys in Superman, Get Smart, Smalville, Phantom Menace) as Mankar Camoran was a great match, as well.

But yeah... having ~4 voice actors for the 500 generic characters in the game did hurt the immersion, especially when, say, two members of the same gender/race (therefor

And hopefully they'll return to the creativity of Morrowind, and not succumb to the mediocrity of tudor houses, butterflies, stereotypical european looking knights, uninteresting vegetation, and dialogue full of "thee's" "thou's" and "milady's".

Morrowind was a shot of brilliant originality and amazing art-direction into what had become a tired genre. Oblivion was full of stock concepts and unoriginal ideas -- yeah, yeah, I know "but that's Cyrodil"... whatever...

I'm currently playing Super Mario Galaxy. That's an amazingly good game from a series that dates back almost 25 years. I don't care if companies keep making games from awesome series, as long as new series come out as well from time to time.

Apparently we have differing definitions of 'amazingly good'. I've repeatedly been attempting to play through Galaxy, but keep getting stymied by the poor controls and bizarre camera angles, which are both a result of running around on those little spheroids. Of course, the awful camera was also in Super Mario Sunshine [closeoutwarrior.com], too, so it's probably to be expected at this point.

That's pretty unusual. I, reviewers and also most people I know who've played it think that the controls are tight and that the camera has its moments but is generally OK. Even my eight year old nephew found the controls very intuitive! I think its because Mario's shadow always falls on the point directly beneath him, that makes perfecting jumps pretty easy.

Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the mos

Galaxy is one of the best platformers ever made. It would take a dramatic amount of incompetence to have your progress stunted by the controls, which are fluid and tactile. My wife, who never played video games until this year, is able to play through the game. You seem to be less skilled at games than a woman who has approximately 2 months of total video game experience to her name. Apparently you can only deal with reality if the camera is peering over the top of your head from behind. One of the most fun aspects of Galaxy is dealing with the shifting geometry in 3D space, dodging obstacles and enemies at the same time.

Wow, that's quite the leap. I found the camera disorienting when it's obviously flawless so I'm must be massively incompetent?

The camera can move around all it wants, that doesn't really bother me, but I expect that Up is always Up, i.e., when I press Up, my character goes toward the top of the screen. In Galaxy, Up is Up until the camera changes angles, and then suddenly Up is Keep Moving Forward Even Though That Direction Might Not Be Up In Relation To Your Screen... Until you stop moving, then Up is Up a

You don't understand 3D space well enough. Pushing the control stick forward does not mean "Up". It means "Forward". Mario always moves forward in the direction he's facing when you push the control stick forward.

Like I said, my wife gets it, and she doesn't even play games. You need practice. Galaxy is a fabulous game, designed for people that can figure out how directions work without throwing a fit and declaring the game "flawed".

I think I have a pretty good grasp of 3D space, I've managed to navigate through at least a dozen rooms today and haven't collided with any walls.

It sounds like you're trying to tell me that I can't dislike the game because I don't like the controls because the controls are absolutely perfect, which is completely asinine. Just like you get to like the game all you want, I get to dislike it all I want for whatever reasons I choose. For this game, it's the controls. I don't like them, and I've completed over

Well, I apologize for my tone. I was annoyed at a homework assignment I'm working on, so I decided to bark at someone on the internet.

However, you did indicate an inability to understand what direction Mario would move when you pushed "up", and I wanted to point out that his behavior is consistent if you learn to divorce yourself of the notion that "up" on your TV screen is related to "up" in the game world's 3D space.

Isn't it saying something that the saving grace for Morrowind and Oblivion were the fan-made mods? Neither were very good games, they were just easily moddable and had GOOD COMMUNITIES. It sort of baffles me that Bethesda is as successful as it is since it produces mediocre games.

When I saw that Bethesda had bought the Fallout license a little part of me died inside. Luckily Fallout has a great and VERY dedicated community. So maybe once the community saves it, it'll be a game worth playing.

I think of Bethesda as the ID of the RPG world, they make nice engines but poor games. Unlike with ID engines it doesn't take buying another title to get a good game though, you just download the fan-made content.

I would suggest Bethesda makes ALMOST-great games with flaws. They make huge worlds. They make very polished, quality products. Their games have immense playing time. Yet they always seem to be missing something.

The modding community fills that void, but there are plenty of people who truly love the vanilla titles as they are.

However, I'd never buy a console version where I couldn't install mods.

I look at it from a different angle: Bethesda's game are the nearest you can get to a single player table-top and dice Roleplaying game.

Most GM's I played traditional RPGs with were interpreting the rulebooks to enhance the gameplay and the better one came up with their own quests and stories, while trying to keep in line with the official lore. Basically, they were modding the official game.

Bethesda gives you a world to roam, a background story, pre-defined quests and game rules which you might or might no

They won't guarantee if the CS will ever ship either. I really hope it does, but the Fallout fans are different from TES fans and Oblivion got re-rated by the ESRB after the fact, based upon a mod released by fans (which in and of itself is stupid). Bethesda is the developer and publisher. They could lose big bucks if the game is yanked from shelves, re-rated, and even causes a law suit based upon some mod a fan releases. And mind you, the Fallout-mods will no doubt be much more mature.

While I personally think that the re-rating of Oblivion was silly, there's more to it than what you describe. The "topless" skin that the mod used was already in the game. Bethesda shipped it on the DVD. While it was not accessible in-game, the ESRB had already made it clear with "hot coffee" that this did not matter.

Second, Fallout 3 is already rated M. Even if it was full of topless skins its doubtful it would see a re-rating on that basis.

I worked briefly on a Fallout mod project. One of the team members insisted on an option to rape every NPC in the game, because in his mind Fallout meant depravity. That kind of content could push the game to an AO rating, removing the game from shelves and prompting law-suits.

This may be a great tactic, actually. If you let the fanfare and sales for a game drop off, and THEN release the editor, you can spark new interest (and possibly sales) with its release, as its fans all return in droves to get cracking at mods. At that point, they can afford to care a lot less about the game getting re-rated as a result of some mod.

I don't pay X amount of money for an engine in the hopes someone else is going to get around to making it a fun game.it was the first elder scrolls game I bought (didn't play the first two, played morrowwind a bit), and its going to be the last. I actually did complete it, but it was nothing more than a shiny turd. No reviewer had the spine to give it what it was worth (a 60%, I give it a bump from 50% because of the graphics, but the gameplay was pure mediocrity) and the fan boys were too busy going "OMG L

It's not so much a matter of making the game harder, it's a matter of making it more consistent.

Oblivion was designed to be a console game and to be played by console gamers. It was essentially a fighting game trying to pretend it was a RPG, with a completely inconsistent, illogical world. What OOO and other mods did (BTW, Oscuro is the name of the guy, not the mod) was make the game more consistent, get rid of (or at least greatly reduce) the nonsensical auto-levelling enemies and rewards, and try to inter

Seriously? What kind of glutton for punishment are you? I have no trouble with RPGs as a rule, but I had to quit Oblivion because I was getting murdered by monsters for quests at the beginning of the game. Oblivion was fucking hard, who would want it harder?

Yes, the mods like OOO didn't simply make things harder, they rebalanced the entire game and made it make sense.

Vanilla Oblivion got VERY hard VERY fast if you didn't level up very very carefully...with everything in the entire game getting harder every time you leveled up. If you weren't extremely careful with how you leveled your skills, suddenly just about anything in the game could tear you apart. However, if you did level up your skills just right, you'd fare much better. Even in this best case scenari

Am I the only person to have found the "difficulty" slider in the options? I just turned it down a bit. It makes for a WAY more enjoyable game. Now mudcrabs are easy to kill at level 16 along with most other basic monsters and you don't have carefully level only certain skills. You just run around the world completing quests and not worrying about leveling. I play on the PS3 so I can't install any mods.

That does work, but you lose out on a bit of the experience with the slider lowered. Either way, it still just doesn't feel right with everything in the world leveling every time you do, even if it's by a lower amount. Plays way better when a wolf is always within the expected range for a wolf:)I have played through vanilla oblivion, and I did enjoy that just fine in and of itself...but I do much prefer it with the mods. Pretty much makes it a completely different game.

Have you played Oblivion? I've played through the entire game both on the PC and on the Xbox and I never got 1 experience throughout the entire game. Your levels were not experience based, they were skilled based. You either are having difficulty remembering the game or you never played it sir.

The only thing I can think of, is possibly that you're equating raising skills with experience and failing to reach maximum potential from leveling i

Er, I wasn't talking about 'experience points' or skill points or anything like that at all. I was talking about experiencing everything available in the game. I assure you I most certainly have played the game. Read in context next time and take a chill pill while you're at it.

As others have pointed out, my choice of the word "harder" wasn't exactly great.
The mods I use balance the game better. Some things are tougher (My char can't run fully loaded for longer than 30-40 seconds without having his vision getting blurred and starting to faint), some things get easier, after a while (killing rats or mudcrabs from level 5 or 6 onward for example).GeckoX explains it better than me in his answer.

I'm only a few hours in, but I completely disagree so far. Oblivion managed to catch my attention for around 200 hours. Fallout 3 is already started to wane at about 4 hours. If it doesn't pick up speed soon, I'm going to be very, very disappointed.

In the first 3 months we had a 360, the g/f and I managed to rack up about 350 hours on Oblivion between us... It's really interesting to watch someone else's play style - I'm a "Throw in a huge spell, summon a Daedra and charge" type and she's a "Sneak in, throw in a large AOE DOT, go back invisible and backstab the screaming burning victims" type.

I agree. It's impressive the number of tactics you can use. My main one was 'sneak up to them, blast them with a massive spell, and run like a sissy if they don't die.' This only works if you move the slider a bit towards 'easy' though.:) Arrows worked quite nicely as well, though.

My tactic on Morrowind was 'pummel them unconscious, then take the sword to them.'

I disagree with your disagreement... I put in almost 18 hours on the game just on October 28th alone, and it's been completely awesome so far. Way better than Oblivion, and while very different (in terms of game mechanics) from Fallout 1 & 2, in many ways it is better than those games as well.

There are some changes. But if you examine it in an unbiased fashion, they have actually improved several game mechanics from the first two games.

1) You have to get power armor training to wear power armor. This prevents people from making a 1st level character with a high outdoorsman skill and walking to Navarro to get Adv. Power Armor, completely breaking the game. And knowing that it was there, and that you could, made any replay of the game feel totally contrived at that point.

2) Medicine. Changing the mechanic of medicine skills was a Good Thing. In Fallout 2, First Aid/Doctor were much faster in terms of game time. But in terms of player time spent clicking, just slapping "rest until party healed" was faster, so people didn't use those skills much. Now, since Medicine impacts stimpack effectiveness, people will both use the skill AND value it more, regardless of their build.

3)Healing mechanics. Not being able to rest in the wasteland without a bed means finding food, water, or stimpacks to regenerate HP. In Fallout 1/2, you could just use the pipboy to rest a lot, in almost any location, and therefore avoid the need to use stimpacks at all. Ample use of resting in the game often lead to me having huge stockpiles of 200-300 stimpacks simply because I didn't have to use them. They became less of a commodity.

3)Weapon skills. Weapon skill ratings affect both your accuracy in VATS, as well as your damage in real-time and outside of VATS. This means a couple of things; it means that a level 1 character can't use a laser rifle to much effect, in or out of VATS, without a high energy skill. This means that, as with the power armor, you can't break the game by finding a plasma rifle early on. It also means that you can use VATS to get out of playing an FPS, but you can't avoid using VATS to get out of playing an RPG. Somebody with low weapons skills still does poor damage, even if they're a crack shot with the mouse.

4) Weapon conditions. First, repairing weapons gives a lot more use to out of the repair skill. It also seems more realistic than having weapons and armor that never degrade, despite years of use (Fallout 1/2). Secondly, this makes weapons more of a commodity than they were in the first games -- since you have to constantly acquire weapons to repair your own, it creates more financial expenses for your character (which is good because it makes bottlecaps more of a commodity).

5) Stealing mechanics. In Fallout 3, you can't rob a vendor of their shop inventory without killing that vendor first (as in Oblivion). This may seem unrealistic, and it is, but it is important to maintaining game balance (and thereby fun/replayability). In Fallout 1/2, you could often eliminate scarcity for your character simply by buying something at a store (say San Francisco), then stealing all of your bottlecaps back from the shopkeep, and then repeating over and over until you had more armor, weapons, medical supplies, and ammo than you could possibly carry. Combined with the possibility of scoring free Adv. Power Armor in the early stages of Fallout 2, this made the game unenjoyable rather quickly once you knew about these locations and how you could exploit them.

Fallout 3 may be different, but I think it's better. I bought my copy to support Bethesda, and I sincerely hope they release expansions and/or Fallout 4.

I thinks "some changes" is an understatement. If I wanted a first person shooter I would buy one. Why Bethesda needed to bastardize a great franchise that they did not create into a FPS I will never know.

I think it sums it up best to say "When all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail" and all Bethesda has is a FPS engine.

The AC below suggested that you haven't played it which, tbh, they have no way of knowing. It is obvious, however, that you didn't read the GP as he made a good point about VATS pointing out that you can mostly avoid the FPS elements in FO3. Whilst I doubt it'll be that simple (and I'm not that bothered as I'm OK at FPS games), all the reviews I've read so far suggest that you can use VATS in that manner to a large degree.

Why Bethesda needed to bastardize a great franchise that they did not create into a FPS I will never know.

Fallout 3 is not an FPS. Two reasons why:

1. You can play the game in third-person entirely. Just zoom-out to your preferred distance using the mouse wheel, and then you control the camera with the mouse. This feature was available in Oblivion, but combat was clunky in third-person view, so it was hardly ever used.

2. If you use VATS, you never have to aim at a single enemy - pressing the VATS button w

and the hit location (and thus damage) is determined by your skill level.

Actually, the hit location is determined by what you were aiming at. If you shoot for the head and hit, you get a headshot, along with all of the benefits that entails, like the chance of disabling the opponent's head and the higher chance of a critical strike. However, your base damage with the weapon is set by your weapons skill, and (I'm not 100% on this) it seems like your weapon skill influences how accurate your bullets are in

Well, then let me be the one who says it. Deus Ex was a mix of FPS, RPG, Stealth, etc, elements, and it was quite easy to be disappointed, if you liked one and hated the others. Sorta like chocolate filled with cherry liqueur doesn't necessarily appeal to everyone who likes chocolate, fruit or booze, but rather to an intersection. There'll be plenty of people who still won't find it a substitute for fresh fruit, for example.

And yes, it had multiple ways of solving everything, but not all ways of solving any

I'd agree with all of that. And I can especially see how some fans of the old games would be disappointed if they aren't into fancy graphics and run older systems, and how you could be seriously disappointed by the inability to have 4-5 companions. Heck, even I am a little.

It's a different game, for sure. But there are too many RPG elements to call it "just an FPS" like the OP did. Your skills affect your abilities in combat, there are still multiple solutions to most quests (combat/diplomacy/stealth, like

P.S. Fallout 3's real-time/VATS system reminds me of Fallout Tactics. Now, a lot of people didn't like Fallout Tactics, for many reasons. I loved it's party-based system, open-ended character design/recruitment mechanics, and combat mechanics (including the real-time mode with the AP regeneration mechanic); I just hated the fact that it was mission-based instead of free-roaming. It had a couple of alternate endings, but they both culminated in the same place, so to call it "open-ended" would be a farce.

So let me get this straight, you're upset because a company bought the intellectual property for the Fallout world and then decided to make a game, with that intellectual property, that runs from different mechanics from what you want ergo Bethesda has bastardized a great franchise!

Next time you play the game watch the intro again. Do you remember heavy guitar rifts at the end of anything from Fallout 1 or Fallout 2? It totally breaks the immersion. These kind of changes are the same as Hollywood "improving" things like I am Legend. Don't like those "improvements" either.

The iimplimntations to 'fix' the games problems you list are all lame. There a band-iad and do not fix the underlying problems in those situations.

Completely ignoring the fact that if someone want's to grab the power armor right off, so what? I wouldn't, but there are many ways to enjoy computer games. Some people like to max out and run around killing things, or max out so they can enjoy the unfolding of the story without worrying about pointless random encounters.

You can only get the story once, and then what have you got? Replayability isn't a requirement, but certainly it's better with it than without it, no?

You also only addressed my first point. Sure, stories are important, but Bethesda's game seems to have an engaging one. Saying that random encounters are "pointless", however, is folly. They were a huge part of Fallout 1 & 2 - the theme of the wastelands is that there is no law & order, the whole world is some high-noon spaghetti western, and filled wi

On #5 -- it makes no sense that a shopowner in Fallout 2 could remain in business, and continually restock his inventory, when the Chosen One robs him of all of his coins every time he sells his inventory off (to the Chosen One, incidentally, making the Chosen One rather rich). The shopowner would run out of money, close up his shop, and become another jet-addicted junkie on the sidewalk. What, does that guy have like, a billion coins buried in the middle of the wasteland somewhere or something? Why does a

Oblivon is a fine game. It's only the hardcore RPG fanatics that don't like it, and almost all the criticism of the game comes from them. I say fuck the RPGers. If you consider it more like an adventure game with some FPS and roleplaying elements then it's not bad at all.

I'd consider myself a fairly hardcore RPGer and I thought Oblivion was excellent after applying the appropriate fan mods. The only massive mistake out of the box was the auto-levelling. On my original playthrough I made a char with things like speechcraft, mercantile and sneak as primary attributes with an aim to avoid combat as much as possible until I was rich enough to afford good gear. This was a good strategy in Morrowind but the auto-levelling completely ruined it.

I hated the Auto Level Balance. It meant that the staple of Elder Scrolls games through the ages - "Ok this area's too hard for me, better go away and level a bit" was gone. It also meant that when you reached level 30-odd pretty much every bandit was carrying 10,000 odd gold in rare or magical equipment. If these guys had such treasures, why didn't they retire and live well off the proceeds of selling them? A better idea would have been that mobs had a base level and then advanced slower than you - say 1/4

It was the downfall of Oblivion, to me. It was a lovely game, and honestly even the repetitive voice acting I could live through, but having to get a 3rd party mod just so the game seemed worth playing? I leveled up once, and suddenly all the wolves in the forrest turned into sabretooth tigers and I was unable to leave the town without a horse.Sad.

After a full weekend of Fallout 3 where I completed the main quest line, I have to say that Fallout 3 is a universe prime for an MMO.
The game struck me as an MMO that was changed almost at last minute to a single-player game; the size of the map was pretty much a full MMO zone and the scope of the game was truly epic when you incorporated the side-quests and exploration.
This deserves to be shared with everyone!

The trailer [youtube.com] and the NAME have been out for a few months, I've seen some screenshots before but I can't find them now, but the best I could find was this [imageshack.us]
MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Looks like that trailer got leaked pretty early [youtube.com]. A whole year before the official trailer was released? Nice work pirates!

Nice picture, too. I'm somewhat surprised that the only screenshot Bethesda has is of a mountain. Not to mention that it's hosted on imageshack. I guess they're really getting overloaded on the server.

I wondered why there weren't any comments - it's because it's a fake video. I was a bit suspicious as soon as the map showed an area named "Empire", which isn't overly Elder Scrolls-like, but then the first character appeared and he's a Warhammer Warrior Priest! Here [youtube.com] is the original Warhammer video.

Someone needs to mod the parent down as "-1 fake"

(Yes, I know it might be obvious to others, but not everyone will have seen the Warhammer video)